5 Things That Shouldn't Make You Mad (But Will)

There's a lot of anger in the world today for a hell of a lot of reasons. People are angry at the president, angry about big business, about the climate, about employment, and about the lack of compelling storylines in porno. And while you should be justly angry about so many things, there's an equal amount of stuff people will get pissy about for no good reason whatsoever. The kinds of things that set you off even though you can't explain why and you'll look silly if you try to justify it but, oh well, you're still pissed. Things like this stuff!

#5. Hiccups

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According to science, a hiccup is what occurs when I have no idea. What am I, an ornithologist? It's something to do with a flipped diaphragm or whatever. The point is, a hiccup is when someone goes "hyack" about 300 times in a row and you sit there and try not to murder them until it ends.

Nothing in the world has more bullshit home remedies than hiccups. You'd think people would spend more time trying to figure out if lemon and honey cures cancer, but they don't. Instead they let you know that breathing into a paper bag on your head while drinking water with a Hot Pocket in your ass will probably fix those hiccups right up. Also, it never works, so instead of just being annoyed by hiccups, you get annoyed by hiccups and the ridiculous ways people try to fix them. But the fact that there are so many ways to try to fix them speaks to just how much people hate them. They'll try 101 ridiculous things to make them go away because hiccups are the biological function equivalent of that guy who smears shit on the walls in a public restroom. They're just so awful.

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You've done good work in here, Stinky.

No one has control over hiccups, which is why it's kind of shitty to be so frustrated by them. I get hiccups and I piss myself off; it makes no sense. I assume it's the repetitiveness of it that is so off-putting, like when you're a kid in school and that little fuck who sits next to you keeps poking you because his mom drinks a lot and his dad is never there and he thinks this kind of shit is kosher and it's not like it hurts, it's just that eventually you have to stab him with your pencil so he understands his place in the natural order of things.

I like to think that on some primal level we're offended by hiccups as a lack of control. We see some hiccuping chucklefuck and think, "What a weak-willed nancy," or something very similar to that. You can't even stop your body from making cartoon spasms. You eat shit and die. Is that fair? No. But life isn't fair.

#4. Chewing

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Is this one just me? I've tried to get over it for years, but there's nothing to be done for it. My choices are hypnotism, some kind of voodoo intervention, or living alone in the mountains, I think. I absolutely despise the sound of chewing. If another person has to eat near me and I can hear it, start a timer, because in under a minute blood will be dripping from my ears and hissing like alien blood on the ground when it lands.

I understand that my hatred of the sound of chewing is irrational, as my emotional response is on par with watching the slaughter of innocents, as though I'm being forced to endure cosmic injustice. It's just chewing. But fuck me ... I feel like we should all know how to chew at this point. I think everything on Earth masters chewing the day it is born except humans. There are single-celled organisms out there that just sort of sit on protein blobs or whatever the fuck they do and absorb those nutrients, and there's no slurpy sound, no chomping or weird fucking humming or yummy sounds that make me want to drown them in a toilet and leave them there with their pants around their ankles so that, when they're discovered, people assume something even worse than what really happened went down, as a kind of final insult.

There's obviously no good reason why this one sound enrages me so much, but there it is. I feel like it's a sign that you can't be bothered to separate yourself from a medicated ape. Like that extra bit of effort required to close your mouth is just too much, so shlappy shlompy squish squash, put more fucking pudding in my hole.

#3. Different Points of View

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Let me preface this by saying that it doesn't apply to everyone, or all the time. But some people, sometimes, just cannot and will not handle even the idea that someone thinks a different thing. And while we all want to live under the belief that we're all unique and beautiful little snowflakes and special and different in every way, fuck anyone who is different and unique in a way we don't like. And this doesn't mean I like freedom and you like subjugation and prison camps for redheads. This means I think Fight Club was a good movie and you don't, so now I have to carpet bomb your house and make your parents watch as I flay you alive, you dumbass opinion-haver, you.

The Internet has likely shown you that what you think about movies, music, religion, and politics really rubs someone else the wrong way. Just mention on a liberal website that you're a Republican and wait for someone to call you a fascist or right-wing nutjob. Do the opposite and see how long it takes for someone to condemn you for your position on abortion. And this could all have started in a conversation about cookie recipes.

If you dislike the Godfather movies, someone will probably insist you're either insane or retarded at some point in time. This will hold true for any opinion that is not the popular opinion. You dislike X, or you think Y is better than X, where X is literally anything regarded favorably by a majority of people, and you will be called out. And it will be mean. It will be so fucking mean. You whole bloodline will be called to task if you allow the conversation to fester.